AURSEEAursee · method
Fire radiative power (MW)
What fire radiative power measures, how Aursee adds it up, and how to compare two fires.
The measurement
Fire radiative power (FRP) is the rate at which a fire gives off radiant energy, estimated from the mid-infrared signal of the pixel. It is reported in megawatts. A larger number means more vegetation burning, or burning more intensely, at the moment the satellite passed.
It is a snapshot. It says nothing about the hours between passes, and a fire partly under cloud reports only the part that was seen.
How Aursee adds it up
The MW figure on a fire page is the sum of FRP over every detection grouped into that fire in the current 24-hour window. A fire seen by three satellites contributes three times. The figure is therefore best read as a ranking between fires on the site, not as the physical power of the fire at one instant.
Rough scale
On 21 September 2026, 92% of the 26,397 fires on the site summed to under 100 MW and the median was 9 MW. A few hundred megawatts is a large fire front; several thousand is among the largest burning anywhere at that moment. The fires index ranks today's fires by this figure.
More on the method
- What a satellite fire detection isHow VIIRS finds active fires from orbit, what a 375 m detection means, and when a fire is not seen.
- Fires in the dark: how satellites find them at nightWhy a fire is easier to see from orbit at night, how VIIRS picks a flame of a few dozen square metres out of a 375 m pixel, and what “burning in darkness” means on the map.
- How detections become firesThe rule Aursee uses to turn individual satellite pixels into fires you can open, name and follow.
- The burn archive, 2012 to todayHow Aursee remembers where fire has been detected since 2012, and what the history figures on each page mean.
- Lightning near a fireHow Aursee checks for lightning before a fire was first seen, and where that check is possible.
- Land cover and roads under a fireWhat kind of ground a fire is burning on, and how many roads are around it: sources and resolution.
- Weather at a fireWhere the wind, humidity and temperature on a fire page come from, and at what time and resolution.
- Data sources and licencesEvery dataset Aursee uses, who publishes it, and the licence it is used under.